The Physician on a Board of Directors: Bane or Benefit?

With the accelerated development of innovative domains such as artificial intelligence, big data, and personalized healthcare, the continuing growth of health-tech and bio-tech industries is to be expected. Concurrently, the question of the extent and nature of physicians' involvement in these rapidly evolving industries arises, especially in management and leadership capacities such as directors or chief executive officers of such companies. Against this backdrop, the Israeli Medical Association recently launched a first-of-its-kind course designed to train senior physicians as directors in health-tech companies by providing them with vast relevant financial, legislative, and professional proficiencies.

Home Hospitalization Worldwide and in Israel.

Global trends, such as the population aging, the increase of chronic morbidity, soaring costs of healthcare services, and work overload in hospitals raise the need to find innovative solutions for providing quality medical services. One solution adopted by healthcare systems around the world is "home hospitalization," that is, providing an array of necessary health services in the patient's home, instead of in the hospital department. The aim of this focus article is to explore the spread of home hospitalization worldwide and examine the challenges and pathways for its adoption and implementation.

[HOW MANY PHYSICIANS ARE ACTIVELY PRACTICING MEDICINE IN ISRAEL? ON THE DIFFERENCES BETWEEN VARIOUS METHODS OF MEASUREMENT].

In 2018, Israel replaced the workforce surveys of the Central Bureau of Statistics with administrative data files, as the source of its reports to the OECD on the number of physicians practicing medicine and their percentage of the population. In the wake of the change, the scope of the medical workforce reported by Israel dropped by approximately 9%-15% in each one of the years from 2012-2015. Furthermore, while according to the previous measurement approach, Israeli figures were consistently equal to or higher than the yearly OECD averages, according to the new method these figures are lower than the averages of other OECD members.